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Peter, of the Legendary Peter, Paul & Mary, Board Member, along with the Chairman of the Board, Captain Williams, dedicated Sun 1 Wing for future palliative care patients and their families. Town of Branford First Selectman, Jamie Cosgrove, said how proud he was that the first palliative and hospice programs started in Branford, at The Connecticut Hospice, Inc. Years ago, the First Selectman noted that Peter had sung for his grandmother when she was lying in and he touched his heart.

In making his remarks, he called Connecticut Hospice, arguably the best and putting emphasis on all the work The Connecticut Hospice does, both at the hospital-hospice and at home in palliative and hospice care.

Before leaving, Peter kissed the forehead of a dying patient, whose young 12-year old daughter took him by the hand to his bedside. He lovingly kissed the young daughter on her forehead and she hugged him. These acts of kindness were met with tears by the patient’s wife and the little one.

Peter’s concert followed-up on the beautiful article that appeared in the New Haven Register noting that, “Connecticut Hospice’s Palliative Care Program, known as Stand By Me, would be widely available in home care.”

Attended by 10 patients in their beds and 150 staff, volunteers and students, Peter’s concert made everyone happy with his folk music of “Puff the Magic Dragon”, “Leaving on a Jet Plane”, “This Land is My Land, This Land is Your Land.”

Peter said he is at home here and the most amazing moments of his life were spent here with his mother when she was a patient. Peter said he spent every moment here, even sleeping over the many nights, because he could see that his mother was in the most capable, compassionate care of the hospice nurses who he considers angels.

Since 1974, The Connecticut Hospice has offered the highest quality, personalized hospice care to residents across Connecticut, plus a variety of support services to their families and caregivers.

America’s first hospice, recognized nationwide for clinical excellence, The Connecticut Hospice provides care at home, in skilled nursing and assisted living facilities, and at a premier inpatient facility on the shore of Long Island Sound in Branford. Inpatient level of care is also available at Norwalk hospital.

Stand By Me, our NEW unique Palliative Home care program, offers care to individuals continuing life-prolonging treatments (for instance, chemotherapy, radiation, dialysis, etc.). Your plan of care will be custom-designed by our interdisciplinary team to meet your individual needs at home, and will provide continuity of care should your needs or setting change.

Our team of professionals concentrates with the goal of maintaining quality of life through management of pain and other symptoms.

We invite the public to join The Norwalk Team on Saturday, June 17th for a special seminar the “Stand By Me” at the Norwalk Seventh Day Adventist Church

You can also view us on a special Cablevision New Channel 12 Our Lives program from Saturday June 17th through June 20th, 2017 at the following times:

Offered by The Connecticut Palliative Physicians Group ® of The Connecticut Hospice, Inc.

Orig.: 5/2005
Revised: 12/2016
Executive Summary

Definition of Palliative Care:

Palliative care is interdisciplinary care aimed at improving the quality of life for patients with life threatening illnesses. Pain control and practical support for patients and families is integrated along with all other medical treatments. Hospital based palliative care programs typically involve medical and nursing specialists, social workers, clergy, and a variety of other paraprofessionals integrated into a coordinated team within a consult service or an outpatient clinic.

Six physicians are available from The Connecticut Palliative Physicians Group.®

All ambulatory oncology clinical patients referred by their oncologists will be eligible to be seen. The SupportCare team will consist of the primary oncologist, a palliative physician specialist, palliative nurse specialist, social worker and other paraprofessionals as deemed appropriate on an individual basis including a spiritual counselor, art therapist, and/or a bereavement counselor. CPPG will provide the palliative physician specialist and/or incorporate existing physician leadership into a coverage scheme. CPPG can provide a dedicated social worker as well as any additional paraprofessional support. Teaching roles assumed by palliative physicians will include case centered didactic discussions with members of the SupportCare team as well as ongoing training of team members. Oncology fellows are welcome to rotate through the Support Care Clinic.

Reasons to request a consultation may include:

Pain and symptom management
Counseling/guidance about care options
Assistance in admission to a Connecticut Hospice Service our Hospice/Palliative Hospital, CanSupport Home Care, Hospice Home Care, nursing facility, acute hospital services
Loss, grief and bereavement support
Follow-up for a CanSupport Home Care patient

SupportCare consultative service

The same core group of professionals will staff the SupportCare consult service. CPPG will offer 24 hour a day, 7 days a week phone coverage for the consultative service. Multidisciplinary rounds with social work, nursing, palliative physician leadership will occur daily. The same criteria for a SupportCare clinic consult will apply to a SupportCare hospital consult with the exception being that patients can be referred from throughout the hospital.

One summer morning in 2001, a good friend of mine, Bronson Conrad, rang me at my Manhattan home. After we’d chatted for a while, he broke the news that he had incurable, terminal cancer in his hip bone.

“What do you mean by incurable terminal cancer?” I asked him, almost with annoyance.

“It means that I’m dying,” he said.

No! How could anybody seem so unperturbed at making such an announcement?

I cannot remember what I said afterward, but I was crying and trying to make him tell me that there was even a faint hope of recovery. It was supremely ironic that he was the one doing the consoling as I became distraught.

Bronson invited me to visit him in Toronto while he was still strong. He was only fifty-something then, a tall and sturdily built former Canadian Army officer who had made his fortune starting up an Internet company and other businesses — even a diamond-mining concession.

Always an energetic risk-taker, he had enjoyed an adventurous life and, as an avid recreational pilot, had flown around the world twice in his own plane. On the second of those flights, in 1999, his wife and two sons accompanied him on what, unbeknown to any of them, would turn out to be their last family trip.

A week or so after his call, I flew up to Toronto. Frankly, I had had no idea what to expect. As soon as I walked into his home, though, I relaxed as I saw my dear friend sitting up and smiling on a high hospital bed in a living room whose panoramic windows look out over a terrace to a small wood.

During my visit, Bronson made and received several business phone calls, and because he was calm and alert, we talked about the fun times we’d shared. Momentarily, it was easy to forget that he was dying.

It was not so easy, however, when he talked about his horrendous pain. That was controlled, he said, by morphine-based medication that he administered himself when he needed it by pressing a button on a portable pump called a “syringe driver,” which subcutaneously injected just the right amount to alleviate his pain without making him lethargic. Despite the fact he was getting weaker from the cancer, he could still talk and even laugh almost like he used to. Nevertheless, my emotional but rather inconsiderately strong goodbye hug made him wince.

Bronson died three weeks later.

Though that was the last time we met, it was the first time for me to encounter the “home-care hospice” system.

Basically, hospice and palliative (or symptom-easing) care, whether in-patient or at home, aims to enable terminally ill people to live out their remaining time with dignity, and as long as possible without pain or suffering. Pain and symptom control is at the heart of this specialist medical field. In practice, it means that patients, and their families, receive interdisciplinary medical support, as well as spiritual support.

In June, I visited Connecticut Hospice in Branford, near New Haven. It was America’s first such program when it was founded in 1974, when Brooklyn-born nurse Rosemary Johnson-Hurzeler began an in-home hospice service funded, for the first three years, by the National Cancer Institute. (Today, there are some 2,400 similar programs throughout the United States)

In 1980, after Connecticut Hospice acquired a building, it was able to offer palliative care to its first in-patients. As a basic rule, only patients diagnosed as having no more than six months to live are admitted, and not for curative treatment or extensive life-support.

Standing inside the new, semicircular three-story building, it felt almost like a small resort hotel, overlooking, as it does, a beach on the New England coast. The all-glass lobby is a bright, wide-open space from which I could look over a green lawn and see boats going by. The second floor is for patients and has fireplaces and tasteful paintings in the hallway. The ceiling is decorated subtly with stars and moons, so that they have something pleasant to rest their eyes on when they are transported from their rooms.

In other words, the goal has been to make the remainder of their lives as comfortable as possible — they can share almost unrestricted time with their families and friends, take care of unfinished business or just relax in peace.

As Johnson-Hurzeler, a platinum-blond woman with a gentle voice yet commanding presence, explained: “Death is but an instant in the comparatively long continuum of one’s life — life that should be celebrated and savored up until its very last moments.” With the support of friendly doctors and nurses — and nowadays mostly paid for by Medicare and private insurance and philanthropic donations — Connecticut Hospice’s care is all about what’s known as Physician Assisted Living (PAL), not about dying.

PAL focuses on the dialogue between physician and patient. Clearly, the physician’s role is pivotal in preparing patients for the possibility of advanced and irreversible illness. But, of course, final decisions on whether to be in the in-patient hospice or hospice home-care — or even whether to go back to a regular hospital — are for the patients to make.

In April last year, cervical cancer patient Michelle Quesinberry, 48, was told that she was terminally ill. Looking back, she said, “I have never been a quitter, but there was nothing I could do.”

As cancer was gnawing her life away, I visited her at home and found her “living one day at a time” with the aid of painkillers and a morphine pump. She said that talking to visiting home-hospice doctors, nurses and social workers gave her an enormous amount of support, especially because they tell her what’s happening and don’t just dole out medication.

“I wish to be happy till I go,” she said. “I just want to spend some time with my family.” Hospice care enables Michelle to stay at home to be with her 83-year-old mother. “My mother keeps me strong,” Michelle said lovingly.

Hospice care is not designed solely for patients, but also to support anxious family members going through such a trying period, and the inevitable bereavement.

Another home-care patient I met was 61-year-old Walter Lechowitz, a victim of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a progressive nerve-degenerating disease that eventually leads to muscle weakness, atrophy and death. He was immobilized from the neck down and unable to speak. Since he learned that he had this incurable disease 18 months earlier, his family had been taking care of him at home — as was his wish.

“We see him get worse and worse every day, but I tell myself that we still have time,” said his wife Diane. “He cries, but all we can do is just give him a hug and let it pass.”

Home-care nurse Laruen Tolla comes twice a week to take care of him, but also dedicates a lot of her time to supporting the family, which, like all families in this situation, is under tremendous emotional and often practical stress. As Rosemary Franco, another nurse, put it, “Our patients and families are angels, but sometimes they are flying low to the ground. It is the privilege of nursing to be their other wing. We learn from patients and families always.”

Despite the burden on them, however, most families apparently want to be involved in patient care. “Our help includes outreach for the family,” said clinical supervisor Sylvia van Heerden. “Caring for the [dying] family member also helps to reduce their fear, because they are actually doing something; they are involved in taking care of the patient. Toward the end of life, people lose a lot of control, and in a way it gives some control to the family and to the patient, as they are actually involved in their own care by making decisions.”

For family members, the experience of sharing the last days of a loved one’s life is very precious.

Among the many I spoke to was Peter Yarrow (from the folk band Peter, Paul and Mary, and today an advocate of the hospice movement). Speaking of his work, he said “This is the most spiritual time in my entire life.”

Years back, he spent the last three weeks of his mother’s life at her bedside in Connecticut Hospice, sleeping there and singing for her. Thinking back, he said the experience changed him for the rest of his life, as he feels he has “never loved anybody with such freedom and honesty.

“With dying loved ones in a hospice, there is no point in lying or talking trivia,” he said. There, love transcends everything else.

To learn that we are dying is the most horrifying moment in life. How can anybody live with such unfathomable apprehension? And is it right to inform people their days are numbered?

From her 22 years of experience, van Heerden said, “A lot of the fear of dying is because people are not informed. Often you can talk to them, about what it is, and what’s happening to them, and a lot of the time fear will subside, because they are informed. Then they can start thinking of important things, instead of fearing, and refocus on other aspects of life.”

On my last day at Connecticut Hospice, I was sitting with Dr. Todd Corte and 53-year-old lung-cancer patient Jane Albert, who started to weep while telling the doctor about her condition. She was a teacher for the blind, and had married only three years before. Although cognitively she must have known that she would die, I could see that she was clinging on to life, even wearing perfume and a wig. Her pain and symptoms were under control, but her sadness was not.

Corte said to her with utter sincerity, “I wish I had pills for you to ease sadness.”

From an outsider’s perspective, it seems that for doctors and nurses working in a hospice, the hardest thing must be that they hardly ever see patients recover or be discharged, except in rare cases of cancer remission. Every day, four or five patients pass away. Still, because the goal of doctors and nurses at Connecticut Hospice is to ease suffering rather than cure illness or prolong life, my impression was that they did not necessarily see death as failure.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the job is easy. Staff hold what they call a “daily huddle,” in which they sit together and share their experiences, thoughts and feelings. The result is that they all work together as a therapeutic support group.

Altogether, my abiding impression is of tremendous bravery from everyone I met at the hospice, whether they were staff, patients or families. Most of the patients had undergone every treatment modern medicine can offer, only to learn after so much suffering and so many dashed hopes that there was nothing left to do but entrust the rest of their lives to fate.

Yet what I saw was people not just letting go and living in despair or anger, but choosing to live positively until the end, and to enjoy as much quality time as they can. Such humility, combined with an appreciation of life, bestowed upon most patients a serenity that was profoundly moving to witness.

If the day comes when a doctor tells me that I am terminally ill, I don’t think I will be so courageous, and I am sure I will go through a serious grieving period. But then, I hope, I will be able to find support at an compassionate and competent place like Connecticut Hospice. I would also be sure to call everybody I have ever loved to say that I love them, and apologize to everybody I owe an apology to.

Dying with peace of mind, free from unnecessary life support: This is the ideal I learned from my friend Bronson and from Connecticut Hospice

Branford, CT – The Connecticut Hospice, Inc., at its advanced palliative care center, with its Institute for Education, Training and Research, Inc., has a new initiative, the “luv ya bump℠.” The “luv ya bump℠” initiative is to help protect and bring awareness to the importance of preventing the spread of germs during flu season. The Connecticut Hospice, Inc., has developed a new symbol of love called the “luv ya bump℠”, a graphic showing the bumping of two fists, an expressive greeting, as opposed to extending your hand and shaking another’s when you meet and greet someone or/and when you need to say farewell. It shows that you care about not only protecting yourself, but also being empathetic to the person that you are greeting and the world in which you both live.

The “luv ya bump”℠started as an inspiration for its staff, volunteers, patients, families, students and the initiative is spreading throughout our community.

We are creating this symbol, “luv ya bump”℠so that the worry about all the germs on hard surfaces and floating about in the air are diminished by educating ourselves to this new symbol during flu season and beyond. “The importance of taking care of yourself and your loved ones cannot be over emphasized”, said Sylvia van Heerden, BSN, Chief Quality Officer.

On October 1, 2014 an action plan was implemented at the center, but will need constant reinforcement.

Mrs. Marc Alphons Hurzeler, RN said, “Hospice hugs are the norm at our Hospice, but when a hug is not appropriate, the new standard should be the “luv ya bump.℠””

For more information visit www.hospice.com/luvyabump or use your smartphone to scan this
Q code.